In an ideal world, we'd love to drive these cars on a public road, but running machines such as these at their limit on the highway pre­sents practical problems—things like other drivers, speed limits, and roadside hazards.

Our simple solution nearly five years ago was to look for the track in North America that best approximates a challenging road, with a variety of corners, long straightaways, and plenty of elevation changes. A track meeting this description would allow us to assess all-around perform­ance, expressed in lap times, in a controlled and relatively safe environment. The track we chose is the Grand West Course at Virginia International Raceway (VIR), near Danville, a serpentine 4.1-mile circuit that is the nearest the U.S. has to the ultimate racetrack, the Nürburgring Nordschleife in Germany. Automakers from around the world converge on the 'Ring for the development of their vehicles, particularly high-performance models; domestic manufacturers also incorporate VIR in their vehicles' testing programs.

Unlike our "Best-Handling Car in America" test [October 2010], where we used the Waterford Hills road course in Michigan as an element of the selection process, we rank finishers in Lightning Lap strictly on lap times, based on the best run achieved by each car during our two-day event (without any subjective criteria). Handling prowess is important for extracting a good lap time at VIR, but brakes and power are even more significant here, which isn't the case on the tight Waterford Hills track.

The 20 new or revised performance cars we gathered for our fifth edition of Lightning Lap are sorted by base price (which includes performance-enhancing options) into five classes.

We didn't bring any non-street-legal cars to the party this time, so there is no LLU (Unclassified) segment.

As ever, there were some real surprises among the vehicles gathered, although nothing beat the outright record of 2:45.9 set by the Mosler MT900S, or the Dodge Viper SRT10 ACR's 2:48.6, both of which occurred during our third Lightning Lap in 2008. These two cars are, however, hardly built for the street.

The pace has certainly picked up since our inaugural event in 2006, wherein no vehicle beat the magical three-minute mark. In 2007, two cars scraped below three minutes. In 2008, five cars blitzed that mark. In both 2010 and 2011, six machines beat the figure, which is what happens when you're in the middle of the fiercest horsepower war the auto industry has ever fought.